Flying Drones with NodeJS

Flying drones is the new cool thing to do. This workshop will show you how to plug into drone control protocol and make your own controller using NodeJS. We will create a simple autopilot with a predefined set of commands. This workshop will be limited to 10 participants as we want to give all of you an opportunity to connect and try your code on a real drone.

The most advanced use of drones at the moment is in the military, and the most amazing thing the rest of us do is make selfies using the cutting edge technology. This workshop aims to show you that it is not difficult to do more advanced things than just fly around and take pictures of your neighbors changing clothes :)

There are two pieces of software that you need to be aware of when working with drones: Device and Remote.

Some drones use proprietary software on both device and controller side, but the smart publicly available devices are mostly based on open source or at least supported by a good SDK.

The done we will be using on our workshop is Parrot Bebop 2. Device firmware is Android based, it has fully an open source control protocol and an open source SDK.

Remote controller software is much simpler, all it has to do is process status information from the device and send commands back to drone.

Just by making a custom remote controller you can make some amazing things, which I’ll show you in the workshop.

Prerequisites

All you need to be able to fly the drone at the workshop will be a laptop with installed NodeJS and a code editor of your choice (you do know JavaScript right?). I assume that all of you have Git installed already, but you will probably not need to clone a demo repository as you will be good and write it all up :)

Demir Selmanovic

Demir is a developer and project manager with over 15 years of professional experience in a wide range of software development roles. At Toptal, Demir is in charge of the Toptal Engineering Blog as well as the extensive technical and hiring publications Toptal produces for the development community.

The organizer reserves the right to cancel the workshop in case
of unforseen circumstances such as speaker illness. In this case
the tickets will be fully refunded.